We’ll get teams organised early on, see this thread for some thoughts on team building, if you have any idea’s definitely contribute, let’s see what works and what doesn’t. Building a satisfying competetive scene.

[Split teams into squads (Depending on server pop) Get some PVP games going.

This is a “quality of life” patch for the BETA which aims at fixing some of the most urgent issues, and applying a small polish pass to the HUD. The capital ships control scheme also received another iteration.

Have fun and let us know your feedback about the game on our forums, thank you !

Hey everybody, time for a new update. Two weeks ago we released the beta along with patch 0.4.0.0. I’m happy to report that overall, the beta went pretty well. The server crashed twice during the launch, but the issue ( related to multithreading ) was fixed a few days later and the server has been perfectly stable since then.

Last week we released patch 0.4.1.0 with more fixes and improvements to the beta version. We’ve still got a long way to go; namely, the balance is still off, some ships are overpowered ( I’m looking at you, cruiser’s shields overcharge ) and some of the controls / mechanics are still clunky ( locking will get a revamp soon ). Some of the most important feedback we’ve gathered from this beta launch is that the game still has a too harsh learning curve. We’re not all that worried about it (yet), though, since we’ll be add tutorials and more in-game helpers at a later stage.

Upcoming development

As I mentionned last month, our top priority for March will be work on the UI and in-game menus. The goal is to have a first version of the star map and main menus somewhere around end of March.

Although UI has the highest priority, there’s also a number of important tasks that we’ll be working on in parallel. Here’s a non-exhaustive list the next 1-2 weeks:

We’re switching to FMOD for our audio library. Goodbye OpenAL, you served us well, but you won’t be regretted ! The main advantage of FMOD is the higher sound quality ( we can use 3D stereo / multi-channel sound sources, while OpenAL only supported mono 3D sources ) and the ability to apply real-time filters to effects. We might give a try to muffling distant sounds in space as an option - is that something you’d be interested in ? Please let us know.

More iterations on capital ships control scheme.

Another balance pass, especially on ground bases and static defenses. We’re also revising hardpoints on various ships.

We’ll be finally adding the missile, torpedo launchers and laser countermeasures on capital ships. Art assets are ready for this, but due to lack of time it couldn’t get finished in time for the beta.

More improvements to the HUD / controls and revamping the locking system ( it’s been long coming ).

Adding correct projectiles intersection hits with the mesh hull of a ship, instead of using the bounding box.

Finishing the new AI battle system that was being worked on during December and January.

And of course as usual: bug fixes, new minor features, improvements, HUD updates, some new icons, some experimental changes etc…

And that’s pretty much it for the “coming soon” list. A new patch ( 0.4.2.0 ) is scheduled for the new Community Event, probably this week.

This new patch for the beta version introduces the new audio system: FMOD Studio (goodbye OpenAL !) and as such, modifications to sounds are experimental and haven’t been fine tuned yet. If you notice any audio issue, please let us know on the forums, thank you !

The patch also introduces a new targetting system for capital ships and static defenses. MK4 Auto-turrets are now auto-tracking AND auto-firing. This means that you no longer need to manage these auto-turrets at all; they’ll select the most relevant target and fire at it automatically, even if you do not press the primary or secondary fire button. If you’re short on ammo and want to disable this behavior, simply toggle the MK4 Auto-Turret hardpoint group off in the weapons radial menu.

This patch also contains a major balance pass over the ships (especially capital ships weapons, hardpoints and sockets locations) as well as the bomber (the shotgun is now classified as MK2; we also added the Interceptor MK1 guns as an alternative primary weapon, which you can select in the weapons radial menu). We’ve also revamped all the credits rewards for scanning (nerfed), destroying installations (nerfed), passive resources generation (buffed) and active kills (buffed).

Please let us know if the game balance has improved as a result, and report any major imbalance you can notice. Thank you and have fun.

Hey everybody. As you noticed I somehow skipped the update last week, as I was busy working on the next patch. I wanted to make sure that everything that I would mention in this update would be included in the patch. We are hosting a new community event tomorrow at 20:00 UTC, see this thread for the details.

As usual I’ll be patching the game tomorrow a few hours earlier ( hopefully ) than the event starts.

Audio Improvements

We introduced FMOD in the previous patch. This patch is another step up on the integration of our audio library with plenty of improvements. First of all, quality improvements: we were generating too many 3D sound sources, too far away. I profiled a medium battle and realized we had close to 2000 sounds active at a given time. This stressed FMOD systems and caused high cpu usage, forcing some samples to get dropped… and generating a lot of crackling / noise issues. This wasn’t an issue when we were using our old audio library ( OpenAL ) as we were managing the lifetime of sounds ourselves and were cutting sounds too silent / far away from the listener. FMOD requires us to be smarter, so I ended up implementing a “streaming” system for sounds, especially all the 3D sounds attached to a ship ( like, dozens of looping thruster sounds ) which now get created / destroyed on-demand, based on distance to the listener.

As expected, this fixed most of the audio glitchess.

Another area of improvement is doppler. All sounds are now assigned a proper velocity which cause a doppler effect. It can still sometimes be slightly buggy when you approach a source at a high relative velocity, causing a sudden high pitch sound, but we’ll address that at a later stage. Overall, the doppler effect adds a ton to the sound ambience, as you can now hear incoming / outgoing nearby ships flying around you.

Finally, we introduced the “muffle” effect in space. A low-pass filter, simulating muffle is being applied to all 3D sounds. It is done dynamically, so sounds closer to the camera will be normal, but sounds will slowly get muffled the further away they are. The system takes into account atmosphere too, so a denser atmosphere will not muffle as quickly as, say, in deep space.

Overall, all these changes have vastly improved the sound system. Keep in mind the sound samples themselves are still placeholders, for most part. FMOD supports stereo sounds but our sources are all mono, so there’s still room for quality improvements once we replace the 3D sounds with the new effects in a few months.

Interceptor

Kristian has finished texturing the interceptor. Only two base skins are available at the moment ( Scoria and Havoc ) but we’ll add more skins at a later stage. The custom skins we had for the cruiser were done to validate the system. We’ll come back on producing more skins for all ships once we are closer to the release.

Scoria base skin

Havoc base skin

The next ship in line for texturing is the Destroyer.

Ship upgrades

The game now supports dynamically mounting / unmounting ship upgrades and internal equipments. We even have a command line ( for admins only ) to mount stuff on any ship. However, since we’re still lacking the UI screens, the ship default configurations are still static for now. In order to test the new upgrade system, we ended up implementing two new equipments: the long-range scanner, and proximity mines.

Long-range scanner

The long-range scanner is only available on the Interceptor. Open the ship systems menu ( V ) and you’ll see a new option to toggle it on or off:

The way it works is as follows. As you know, we already have an energy emissions system ( the little graph displayed on the top-right corner on the HUD ). It shows the distance at which your ship would get detected by an enemy and flashes in orange when you are being detected.

The long-range scanner allows you to get some information about long-range targets that haven’t been detected by you or your team yet, like enemy infrastructure. Note that in this patch, a base that hasn’t been scouted yet will have its name appear as “Unknown”.

The scanner acts like a spectrograph. Horizontally, you can see the distance of a signal. The scale is based on powers-of-10, so 10^3 at the middle is 1000 Km. The maximum range is 10^6, or a million Km. Almost 3 light-seconds and plenty enough to detect everything in a Battlescape.

Vertically, you can see the intensity of the signal. It isn’t linear either, but the scale doesn’t really matter here; just know that a higher amplitude means a stronger signal. The width of the signal is also important, although more subtle, and roughly maps to the arc angle of the signal. It’ll shrink at higher distances.

Note that the radar does not give direct direction information. You know the type of signal and you know the distance, but you don’t know if it’s in front of you or in your back. This is why there is an additional element to the scanner: a doppler effect. The signals will shift to green as you approach them and to orange/red as you get further away from them. The stronger the color, the higher the relative speed is.

Design-wise, the idea of the scanner is to introduce an element of player skill instead of making another “press-a-button-and-ping-the-entire-system” which you can often see in other space games. For this reason, we’ve also shifted the reward system related to scouting a base: the more difficult it is to find a base ( aka, shorter signal range and amplitude ) and the higher the reward, whereas in the previous versions, the bigger bases ( like Glimmerfall ) were the easiest to spot and were giving the highest rewards. Now, scouting Glimmerfall will bring less credits than scout, say, a small hidden factory somewhere on a planet.

Finally, the new scanner system isn’t restricted to bases. It can potentially scout haulers or other capital ships. So it is possible to see a signal where a battle is happening, although it might not have much practical interest ( if there’s a battle going on, chances are members of your team are there, so it’s already displayed on your HUD as indicators anyways… ).

Proximity mines

The proximity mine launcher is only available on the Destroyer. It has a capacity of 6 mines. Cooldown is 20 seconds.

If you played the Infinity Combat Prototype, more than a decade ago ( aah the nostalgia ), this should ring a bell.

Space stations are now protected by clusters of proximity mine fields. The number of mines in a cluster and the distribution of clusters around a station is randomized, and bigger stations will have a higher amount of mines. A single cluster can have between 2 to 5 mines but it’s possible to find a couple of random isolated mines too.

The Destroyer now has the ability to deploy mines. Once deployed, a mine will slow down and stand still, ready to get activated ( there is an additional delay of 10 seconds before a mine can be activated, so that it won’t detonate too close to your Destroyer if you were deploying it in the middle of a battle .

This is how proximity mines work:

Mines from a defensive mine-field have an infinite life time. Mines deployed by a player have a 10 minutes life time, but can only expire when there are no nearby ships. Otherwise their life time is potentiaolly infinite too.

Mines do a lot of damage. Like, a ton. Like, 10K damage. That’s almost 3 torpedoes. Due to their high damage, they also cause a lot of splash within a 1-km radius. It is guaranteed death to an interceptor that is too closer to an exploding mine. For capital ships, mines are a real threat.

Mines are slow. Twice slower than torpedoes. They can easily miss or overshoot their targets. They only detonate on contact or near-contact.

Mines have a high activation range: 40 Km. However they do not stack within a 25 Km range. This means that if two mine clusters are very far away, you can potentially be targetted by 2, 3 mines or even more !

Since mines have a high activation range, the threat can be anticipated from 30 seconds to a whole minute before. If capital ships have difficulties with mines, it is recommanded they get help from interceptors to clean up the mines before they detonate. Mines explode on contact of anything, so a single missile will get ride of them at a high distance.

Mines can detonate when firing at them from an Interceptor too. They have 1000 HP, so a few volleys should be enough to kill them. Beware not to be within a 1 Km range when they explode. They give a small credits reward too.

Explosions now have shockwaves, that can “bump” nearby entities. It would be possible to have a chain reaction in a mine field, if the distance between mines was close enough.

Mines are sneaky ! Their detection range is barely 10 Km, but as mentionned above, they’ll activate on a target up to 40 Km away. So they will likely lock on you, despite the fact that you can’t see them yet !

We’re using the “crate” art asset as placeholder for the proximity mines.

Small clusters of mines around a space station

For the patch tomorrow there are a few additional features I’m thinking of implementing, assuming enough time:

With safetely lock disabled, mines will no longer slow down and stop, but keep their momentum forever. With some skills it might be possible to use them as bombs, throwing them towards another capital ship, or bombarding a base on a planet ? It might be incredibly difficult though, but technically it would be do-able.

If a mine does not have a target yet and are getting attacked by a ship ( on which they wouldn’t usually lock, because too small, like an Interceptor ), the mine will activate and lock on the attacker.

Scouting mines via the scanner and maybe targging them so that they can be seen from a higher range later on.

The community event should be fun. There are a lot of new things to test, and the full patch list isn’t out yet. See you in game tomorrow !

This patch contains a lot of gameplay and audio improvements. Following patch 0.4.2.0 we continued to iterate on FMOD integration and added support for doppler and space-muffle effects and address audio glitches in larger battles.

The interceptor is now textured and we added a new capital-ship explosion effect, as well as a bunch of new sound placeholders.

On the gameplay side, the new AI battle system is in, and battles will now start and stop based on specific credits accumulation conditions by the AI. It isn’t balanced very well yet, so if the AI generates too many battles and bots at once, we’ll probably have to hotfix the server sooner than later.

This patch contains some architectural changes, probably unoticeable for the player until we integrated a proper menu system. But the game now allows mounting/unmounting ships equipments and various upgrades dynamically. The ship loadouts are still static for testing purposes. The new scanner (Interceptor) and proximity mines (Destroyer) are in.

Finally, we introduced a bounty system, currently controlled by the AI. Enemies that do particularly well will be flagged and killing them will bring you a credits reward. Bounty-tagged enemies have a star icon on top of their HUD indicator.
Note that they cannot themselves see if they have a bounty on their head, but they’ll get a notification when they get killed, if they had one.

Of course, this patch contains the usual quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes amongst many other things. Enjoy !

Gameplay / Balance

Unscouted installations now appear as “Unknown” and need to be permanently scouted for their name to appear.

Introduced scanner equipment. This scanner can detect energy emissions across a long range and give basic information such as intensity, physical size or relative speed.

It is possible to highlight a scanner echo that will get highlighted on the spectrograph ( it is possible to jump to the previous or next echo with Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+U.

Introduced proximity mines. See Weekly Update #135 for more details about how they work.

Upon dying a missile, torpedo or mine will now detonate and cause splash damage instead of simply dying.

Introduced per-installation modules scoring system, installation destruction threshold is based on score and no longer on absolute hitpoints of an installation’s modules

(Previously, the scoring was based on hitpoints. As an unwanted consequence, increasing hangar hitpoints made them the only targets that you really had to destroy if you wanted to destroy the station. The scoring is now independent of hitpoints).

Explosions now generate a shockwave effect which causes splash damage. There is a delay in how long the shockwave takes to reach you (it travels at 1 km/sec) so sometimes the effect of the shockwave might have some latency compared to the visual effect.

This is no bug. In addition, shockwaves can generate a velocity bump if you get caught too close in a light ship like the Interceptor.

Heat increases energy emission signature.

Scouting now requires a scanner, and the scanner has to be active. Using the scanner also doubles your ship’s energy emissions.

Mine fields are generated around space stations when a match is generated.

Introduced atmospheric decay for thrusters, nerfing big ships in atmospheres. This will make the capital ships ( cruiser, carrier ) impossible to take off / fly away from planet’s gravity.

Implemented bounty system. The AI commander will now place bounties on targets that cause of a lot of trouble / deaths.

The bounty system is based on ranks, which can level up as the number of kills increases. At each rank the bounty doubles.

Increased AI attack priorities on targets with a bounty rank.

Finished implementation of the new AI commander battle system. Battles will now start/stop after a certain credits threshold has been accumulated from haulers and other team rewards.

Revamped credits distribution to installations, now taking into consideration limits, and distribution is no longer linear.

Revamped battle / mission notifications. Added a countdown system so that players will know when a new battle is starting.

Increased hitpoints on various installation modules like energy reactors or hangars.

Adjusted scouting / scanner ranges on all installations and adjusted rewards to take into account scanning difficulty.

Doubled atmospheric density decay on all planets, so that warping to the ground level is much faster.

Controls / Input

Fixed a bug with capital ship control scheme: pitch down ( S ) was also reverting thrust !.

Implemented Orbital formation mode. Note that Orbital mode requires to set a target speed. At zero, its behavior is similar to “Chase”. The target speed basically defines the orbital distance. Tangential movements get cancelled out unless you manually thrust.

Added rotation assist toggle event (look for the event called “RotationAssist” in the profile editor). It is not bound to any key by default.

Slight buf to small ship’s linear thrust (around +10%).

Slightly increased angular thrust on bomber to make it a bit less wobbly when aiming.

Weapons

Added activation timer to chaffs ( currently set to 1 second ) and a detonation delay for missiles ( 2 seconds ) ( this solves the problem of missiles instantly exploding near you the moment a chaff is fired ).

Collisions ghosting after a missile / torpedo / mine launch is now temporary. Collisions are re-enabled with the parent actor after a few seconds.

Auto-turrets can now defensively fire at incoming mines.

Auto-turrets no longer target or stop firing at dying actors.

Slightly reduced precision of corvette guns and MK4 auto-turrets.

HUD

Match time only shows up in leaderboard ( it could show up on the main HUD when the scores changed, before ).

Added target indicator for mines

Fixed a bug related to losing selected actor / stats (like hitpoints/shields) on client when a target becomes an indicator.

Added a dim gray/blue galaxy background color. This was done so that ships and structures silhouettes in the dark could be better seen over the background.

Ship death effects can now appear at a long range, even if the ship is out of visible range on the client.

Server and Misc

Server crash fix related to a 0.4.2.0 bug (hotfixed).

Added additional check to server for desyncs between the client’s selected actor target and server’s ( if the actor got destroyed on the server but the client selected it right before, it crashed the server ).

The last patch ( 0.4.3.0 ) introduced a lot of new content which generated new issues. Patch 0.4.4.0 aims at adressing all these issues, starting with stability: it contains an important client crash related to proximity mines, as well as stability fixes to the server.

In terms of gameplay, patch 0.4.4.0 wraps up the implementation of the new battle system, by introducing consequences to lost battles. Battles that are deemed “critical” will be important for the defender’s team to win, otherwise the objective will get destroyed. We added more info popups to inform the player the state of the battles, and completely revamped the battle “missions” notification system with the countdown to the next battle, but also its odds of victory once the battle has started. The battle system also received a balancing pass, with the AI commander being able to transfer credits between objectives as needed. For non-critical battles (aka. balanced between the teams), the winner will receive a nice credits reward. AI should now be able to complete an entire match on its own and even start multiple battles at once on multiple fronts.

This patch also introduces a bunch of tweaks to explosions / capship deaths, a red shockwave for torpedoes and proximity mines, and a new heavy weapons kinetic impact effect (currently the intersections are still done with the bounding box of the ship, however in the future we’ll implement accurate intersections).

Added critical battles when a battle is balanced, which will destroy the objective installation.

Various improvements to dynamically balancing credits between allied or enemy objectives.

Revamped AI commander scouting of objectives.

Added player battle mission notification system.

Added a bit more separation distance to the formation chase mode (sometimes it made the ship fly very close to the target).

Halved activation time on chaffs to make them more reactive.

Fixed a bug which didn’t show the incoming missile alert until the missile got activated.

Fix for carriers being undestructible.

Tweaks to explosions splash and knockback force, to be less invasive/annoying.

Reduced range of defense auto-turrets.

Slight reducion in missiles damage. At the same time, slight increase of interceptor’s hitpoints and shields (respectively: 75 to 80, and 120 to 125). This change allows the interceptor to not instantly die to a single missile hit.

The past two weeks have been intense. And very tiring. But with beta patch 0.4.3.0 out, and its follow up patch 0.4.4.0 a few days ago, I am happy to report that the new battles system is in and has vastly improved the game !

Prior to 0.4.3, the pacing of the game was off. Battles would randomly start in a few places, but would last forever, and you’d often see 20 interceptors versus a lonely enemy. If you logged in at a random time of the week when no other players were around, the game would be quite boring, with nothing to do and probably no large battle to participate in. You’d just fly around randomly, do some small skirmishes, explore a planet and log off.

But since 0.4.3, the pacing of the game has clearly stepped up. At any one time ( maybe excepting the first 15 minutes of a match, when enemy locations haven’t been scouted yet ), there are multiple battles going on. Some small ones, some medium ones, and every once in a while, a massive one ( 100+ ships ). Battles at Glimmerfall or Hebellos ( the huge asteroid bases ) are a sight to be seen. And more importantly, you can have fun with the game, even playing alone. It’s still a bit on the repetitive side after a few hours but it’s definitely going in the right direction and will improve even more once we add more content, more ship upgrades and more weapons.

Another important change with the new battle system are consequences. Battles can be clearly won or lost, now. We introduced the “critical” battle system, which spawns critical battles once it detects an imbalance in credits assigned by the AI commander at the given location. The consequence of losing a “normal” battle is simply team credits, however the consequence of losing a critical battle is the loss of the objective. This means that the AI can now finish a match on its own. The player’s goal is to turn the odds into the team’s favor, and now they no longer have to micro-manage the destruction of every single building or module in a base.

As expected, this has made the game much more battle / action-focused, which increased the pacing a lot and brings it a step closer to the original vision presented during the Kickstarter in 2015.

Another thing which helped a lot is that we revamped the death effects, particularly for capital ships, torpedoes and proximity mines. These huge shockwaves are beautiful and cause a lot of violent shaking ( we even added a knockback and damage effect if you get too close ). The thrill of “being there”, in the middle of the battle, has increased tenfolds, and you’ll often see multiple explosions in the background, giving you a sense of how the battle is progressing. Using torpedoes from the bomber also feels much more satisfying now ( even though technically the amount of damage is the same ) and you won’t be under-estimating proximity mines any more when they’re literrally exploding in your face.

That being said, there is still a lot of work to be done in the battle system. The revamped notification system is a step up, but is still sometimes a bit confusing when multiple battles are going on. The bots AI still needs major improvements ( a bunch of these were already made in January, but haven’t been integrated yet ). Battles are too chaotic, and the bots need to fly in formation, regroup and cooperate better, instead of just chasing random enemies ad nauseam.

In the coming 1-2 weeks, we will be focusing our efforts on the following:

The UI / menu system, which has been pretty neglected so far. There is still a lot of work to be done here

Performance improvements, both on the client and server side. Eventually we would like to double the battle sizes, and reach 1000+ ships per server ( last week we reached 650, so we’re not that far from that goal )

Kristian is focusing is efforts on texturing the Destroyer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready for the next patch, in 2 weeks. Jan is still working on new visual effects and Dan’s doing Dan things ( mostly: streaming, social media and modeling collision meshes ). Finally, Keith has just gotten married and will resume his company activities shortly ( administrative tasks,support requests, web development, business/marketing work etc… ).

This patch focuses on performance improvements in large battles. It should bring about a 50 to 100% fps boost in large battles at Glimmerfall and Hebellos, and a lower but still significant fps boost in smaller battles. In addition to performance improvements, the patch includes a couple of fixes related to battle reinforcements (server-side), localization and a new custom graphical setting mode for debugging.

Emissive values on the hull of a ship are no longer changed every frame when the emissive hasn't changed

Lights are only collected on the hull when the lights layout has changed, and not every frame any more

Statistics are no longer gathered every frame even if the graph stats page isn't currently opened

Thrusters are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance

Lights are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance

Weapons/turrets are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance

This last batch of changes lightens the load on the scene-graph, which previously caused a lot of cpu calculations to update transformation matrices or perform frustum culling on hundreds of objects per ship.

In this patch, thrusters, lights of weapons that aren't in view ( or that are too far away to be rendered ) are simply detached from the scene-graph. From the player’s point of view, there should be no

visual difference, even if turning the camera around very quickly. If you notice any bug introduced by this new behavior, please let us know.

Hey everybody. As you might be aware we are currently focusing on the new user interface / menus system which means that weekly updates and patches have been less regular than in the past months. Our goal is to finish the UI building blocks by the end of April and start implementing the star system map and the ship spawn / upgrades menu during the first week of May. For this reason, this weekly update will be relatively short, until we have more to show.

In other development news, Jan is doing a new pass on space station modules. The idea here is to improve geometric details, revamp materials / colors and add paint sections and various decals. More importantly, we’re adding ambient occlusion to the modules which should help to make the lighting look less flat, especially in shadowed areas. Here’s a bunch of random modules stitched together to give you an idea ( note that there are no lights on them yet, and those are relatively small modules

We’ll give the same treatment to all the other station modules; the work is huge ( there are 50+ modules iirc ), so Jan will upgrade a bunch of them every week until the release.

Dan has completed collision meshes for the Interceptor, Bomber, Corvette and Hauler. During the visual polish phase we’ll use these collision meshes for more accurate projectile hit intersections with the hull of the ships, and not the bounding boxes as we currently do. Dan has been working on crowd-funding rewards for a while too; the mercenary spec ops model variant is already done and awaiting integration in game.

Kristian is completing the textured Destroyer this week. It should normally be available in next week’s patch. After that, he’ll move on texturing the Bomber, then the Corvette, and finally the Carrier. Speaking of which, we still need to figure out the hangar interior for the carrier; there’s a good chance we’ll run out of time, and it’ll have to go into early-access “as is”, but eventually we’d like ships to spawn in the hangar bay and launch through the “tunnel” traversing the carrier.

Keith is working on website improvements, new payment options, customer support and business / company management.

The last piece of news is that we’ve started to collect some generic assets for planetary props. These include rocks in various shapes, forms and styles, vegetation and new surface texture packs. These will be used during the visual polish phase to add more surface details to the planets, give a better sense of scale, and have more interested / varied biomes. Oceans will also make a come back sooner than later ( I already spent a day last week to fix some quality and performance issues with them ).

In terms of schedule, this is more or less what it looks like until EA in september:

August: Final gameplay balancing, tweaks and polishing phase ; adding more content to the game as time permits ( missions, new planet types, more ships upgrades, skins, etc… )

Mid-september: Marketing push + Early access

As you can see, we have plenty of things to do before we can release the game ( even as Early access ), so there’s no doubt we’re gonna have to prioritize and focus on the important things, and delay what we can after EA. Tough times and hard work ahead !

Hey everybody. It’s been a while since the last weekly update, as we’ve been pretty busy on a certain number of topics. First thing first, we are slowly preparing for our Steam launch in Early access. We’ve set up a store page, which you can see here:

You’ll notice a bunch of new screenshots on it, however the trailer video is still the Kickstarter’s. We’re not ready to produce a gameplay trailer just yet as we need to finish texturing all the ships and replace some of the placeholders before we can do that. We’ve planned to work on the first visual polish phase next month and work on the trailer will start around July. In parallel, we’ll keep iterating on the gameplay and content.

Needless to say, now that we have a store page, even if it’s rough around the edges… it’s time to gatherWISHLISTS As you may know ( or not ) Steam’s visibility algorithms on release are mostly based on the amount of wishlists, therefore it is of utter importance to our success to get as many wishlists as possible.

We have ~4 months until the Early access is launched, so from now on, we’d like to ask everybody who references us on websites, content creators, youtube / twitch streamers etc… to add a link to the Steam store page along with a small typical “Wishlist Infinity: Battlescape on Steam” message if you can. If you already have a direct link to our website, you can keep both of course. On a side note, since we now have a Steam store page we decided to stop our IndieGoGo on-going campaign so it shouldn’t be referenced anymore either. Thank you for your support !

Development news

In other random development news: the asteroid rings are back. A patch will go up next week ( ETA: Friday the 24th ) with a bunch of fixes related to rings. This patch will mostly contain bug fixes and small gameplay adjustments, nothing major. Most of the programming effort is still going into the UI. I should be able to start on the star map and ship spawning / uprade menus next week. It’s been delayed a little bit due to the recent focus on the Steam store page.

Kristian is wrapping up the textured Bomber. It should be available in next week’s patch. After that, the Corvette is next and should take ~3 weeks of work. The remaining time ( until the trailer ) will be focused on the Carrier.

Jan is finishing up the upgraded station modules with ambient occlusion. We haven’t put an entire station together, so there’s some amount of surprise on how it’s going to look like with all the upgraded modules fitting together. Expectations are relatively high, with new geometric details, more material variations / cuts, decals, emissive windows, colors and it should look a lot less flat in shadowed areas with ambient occlusion.

Dan is on a judo competition in Japan and should be back next week. Since he’s away, things have been going slow on social media / updates. We’re planning on hosting a new Community event on the 25th to celebrate his ( victorious? ) return.

As usual Keith is working behind the scenes on various backend / website related tasks; last week, he upgraded our payment system to support a wider range of payment types. We’re also starting to figure out Steam’s authentication and the backend changes needed to support a smooth user experience. More news on that in the upcoming months.